Sometimes humor can help us keep things in perspective, and may even give a glimpse of truths otherwise unavailable. Neal Pollock has been writing a series of articles for Salon as “Greatest Living American Author,” as a satiric send up of ivory tower punditry. His most recent article “Breaking: I call upon all Americans to stand together—and also to fight one another,’” actually seems to capture the fractured and contradictory nature of our present reality. He conjures a kind of composite American voice that acknowledges Trump’s election while remaining fiercely separate:
. . . . I speak for all Americans but mostly for myself. While I won’t reveal here how I voted this week, I will say that I also wish to make America great again, believe that we are stronger together, think that vaccines cause autism and have no clue where Aleppo is. Like most Americans to the manor born, this election divided my loyalties and tore my soul asunder. And now approximately a quarter of the people have spoken. They want Donald Trump, an alien lizard-man in human form.
On the one hand, the American people did elect this bad special effect from an old TV mini-series, which sounds pretty bleak, but it was—on the other hand—only a quarter of the people, so maybe there is hope after all.
My favorite paragraph has got to be this one:
Now the white people have chosen, and their choice is clear. We must embrace that choice like we would embrace a moldy old teddy bear after all the rest of our toys have been taken away. “We live in Trump’s America now,” I write in my soon-to-be-best-selling book “Trump’s America,” coming in 2017 from Scribner. “It is an America not like the America we knew, but also exactly like the America we didn’t want to know. Where did America go? It was right here all along. Or was it? Of that, we can be certain.”
Pollock’s pompous ivory tower persona perfectly captures the disorientation so many people feel in the wake of this election, discovering Wednesday morning that this is not the country we thought we knew, although of course it was there all along, Apparently, we can’t have nice things, so now we have Dona Trump recommend the whole piece. You’ll laugh because it hurts.
Pollock does get more inspirational at the piece’s end, but even that has a sting in its tail, while at the same time encapsulating one of the elections conflicts:
We must embrace. We must resist. We must embrist. This was a nation born on the notion of white male supremacy and also on the notion that all people are equal. That conflict, that tension keeps the wheels of capitalism turning, along with oil and bribery. If we want to hold on to America — our America — we have to cling to the ideals that make this country great, even if those ideals sometimes conflict, like weasels trapped together in a sack.
How true, but ouch.